The internet has gradually evolved to offer a wide range of network services for online sharing and management of user generated content objects. Such network services allow a user to share and browse content objects such as multimedia content objects, audio content objects, visual content objects, and text content objects. Some examples of such services are Panoramio™, Blogger™ and Flickr™.
Network services are leading the growing enthusiasm for personal location awareness by allowing the user to spatially organize and browse their personal content objects. Users want to geo-tag their personal content objects and further represent the content objects on a world map. Geo-tagging is the process of attaching location information such as latitude and longitude coordinates to content objects. Geo-tagged content objects can be organized in taxonomy of major locations or pin-pointed on the world map to identify very small regions.
Due to the advent of GPS-enabled devices such as mobile phones and cameras, users can automatically associate the location information such as latitude and longitude with the content objects. However, for the users who do not own GPS enabled devices, geo-tagging is done by manually dragging the content object to a particular point on the world map displayed on a user interface. However, this process is time consuming and less accurate than automatic geo-tagging. Moreover, when manually geo-tagging the content object, network services simply display a world map or show the location of the last uploaded content object on the user interface.
Further, in some cases users append one or more annotations with the content objects. The annotations may be in the form of one or more tags, text, titles or description related to the content objects. Some of the existing solutions involve the extraction of textual or visual features from the annotations and/or content objects which are then modeled to determine the location information. However, these solutions are limiting as they assume the prior knowledge of the location through the information appended with the content objects and usually limit the scaling of the map by a few location granularities. Presently, the network services lack effective methods and systems to associate one or more locations with user generated content objects and present the associated locations automatically on the world map.